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August 22, 2007

“Famine in North Korea:” An Interactive Review (1 of 3)

The time stamp on this post may be the most telling part of it, for I first got my hands on Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard’s “Famine in North Korea:  Markets, Aid, and Reform” back in late March.  The intervening months have been very busy for me, and the book raised more points of discussion than I can cover here.  Noland and Haggard  are two of the finest, most respected scholars of all things North Korean and economic, and their...
Categories Books & Films/Famine & Food Aid
July 22, 2007

What I’m Reading: Andrei Lankov, ‘North of the DMZ’

Back in the 1980s, one of my Russian friends who was then in her early 20s, worked as an interpreter at a joint venture between North Korea and the Soviet Union. She was by no means a prude herself …, but she was somewhat shocked by the amount of sexual banter which her female North Korean colleagues engaged in. For the entire summer when the girls were on their own, they tried to learn as much as possible about the...
Categories Books & Films/Deprogramming/Korean Society
March 12, 2007

Marcus Noland Launches New Book on North Korean Famine

Until now, my main reference has been Andrew Natsios’s “The Great North Korean Famine,” because Natsios’s personal experience inside North Korea added so much to his observations, but Noland is almost in his own category  for sheer quality and rigor of research.  Noland is also the outlier for the low numbers he cites for the death toll from the famine — 600,000 to 1 million, as opposed to 2 to 2.5 million — and I’ve always wanted to know how...
Categories Books & Films/Famine & Food Aid
January 8, 2007

Put This Book on Your List

North Korea expert Peter Hayes – the executive director of the research group Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development – described the novel as ”the best unclassified account of how North Korea works and why it has survived all these years when the rest of the communist world capitulated to the global market a decade ago.””This novel should be required bedtime reading for President Bush and his national security team,” Hayes said. And that was precisely the point of...
Categories Books & Films
May 10, 2006

Review: ‘Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea,’ by Guy DeLisle

Please — not another travelogue of tyranny tourism in North Korea. In the last several years, dozens of con-men, apologists, and petty tyrants have described North Korea as a great place to golf, bowl, get rich quick, or profit by displaying the misery of others. Three U.N. aid workers published a fine dining guide, just as the last mass graves of the Great Famine were filled. A UNICEF worker recently lamented that North Korea was unfairly stereotyped. A Korean-American unificationista...
Categories Books & Films/Inside NK/North Korea